The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (43 page)

The Beautiful; the Difficult, and the Costly

Runaway theory and sensory bias theory are not fully satisfying as explanations of human aesthetics. Runaway cannot explain why we have just the preferences that we do. Our sensory biases may be shared with other apes, but they show little evidence of our aesthetic tastes, so sensory biases do not appear to explain human aesthetics. Perhaps fitness indicator theory can do a better job of illuminating human aesthetics. According to this view, maybe our aesthetic preferences favor ornaments and works of art that could

have been produced only by a high-fitness artist. Objects of art would then be displays of their creator's fitness, to be judged as such. As with the sexual ornaments on our bodies, perhaps beauty boils down to fitness.

To be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low-fitness individuals to produce. Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time. Also, like bowerbirds, Pleistocene artists must have been physically strong enough to defend their delicate creations against theft and vandalism by sexual rivals.

The beauty of a work of art reveals the artist's virtuosity. This is a very old-fashioned view of aesthetics, but that does not make it wrong. Throughout most of human history, the perceived beauty of an object has depended very much on its cost. That cost could be measured in time, energy, skill, or money. Objects that were cheap and easy to produce were almost never considered beautiful. As Veblen pointed out in
The Theory of the Leisure Class,
"The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles." Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody an awareness of what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit.

In her books on the evolution of art, Ellen Dissanayake pointed out that the human arts depend on "making things special" to set them apart from ordinary, utilitarian functions. Making things special can be done in many ways: using special materials, special forms, special decorations, special sizes, special colors, or special styles. Indicator theory suggests that making things special means making them hard to do, so that they reveal something special about the maker. This explains why almost any object can be made aesthetically: anything can be made with special care that would be difficult to imitate by one who was not so careful. From

an evolutionary point of view, the fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive. This challenge arises not only in the visual arts, but also in music, storytelling, humor, and many other behaviors discussed throughout this book. The principles of fitness-display are similar across different display domains, and this is why so many aesthetic principles are similar.

Anthropologist Franz Boas insisted that in most cultures he studied, the artist's virtuosity was fundamental to artistic beauty. In
Primitive Art,
he observed that "The enjoyment of form may have an elevating effect upon the mind, but this is not its primary effect. Its source is in part the pleasure of the virtuoso who overcomes technical difficulties that baffle his cleverness." For Boas, works of art, were principally indicators of skill, valued as such in almost every culture. He added, "Among primitive peoples . . . goodness and beauty are the same." Whatever people make, they tend to ornament. He spent a good deal of
Primitive Art
trying to show that most of the aesthetic preferences of tribal peoples can be traced to the appreciation of patience, careful execution, and technical perfection. In his view, this thirst for virtuosity explains our preferences for regular form, symmetry, perfectly repeated decorative motifs, smooth surfaces, and uniform color fields. Art historian Ernst Gombrich made powerful arguments along similar lines in his book
The Sense of Order,
which viewed the decorative arts as displays of skill that play upon our perceptual biases.

Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about the human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist. The aesthetic features of art make sense mainly as displays of the artist's skill and creativity, not as vehicles of transcendental enlightenment, religious inspiration, social commentary, psycho-analytic revelation, or political revolution. Plato and Hegel derogated art for failing to deliver the same sort of truth that they thought philosophy could produce.

They misunderstood the point of art. It is unfair to expect a medium that evolved to display biological fitness to be well adapted for communicating abstract philosophical truths.

This fitness indicator theory helps us to understand why "art" is an honorific term that connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement. When mathematicians talk about the "art" of theorem-proving, they are recognizing that good theorems are often beautiful theorems, and beautiful theorems are often the products of minds with high fitness. It is a claim for the social and sexual status of their favorite display medium. Likewise for the "arts" of warfare, chess, football, cooking, gardening, teaching, and sex itself. In each case, art implies that application of skill beyond the pragmatically necessary. Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not an art. A claim that one's work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.

By this point in my argument, scowls may have crossed the faces of any readers who happen to have read Immanuel Kant's
Critique of Judgment
of 1790 on their last summer beach holiday. Didn't Kant argue that beauty cannot be reduced to utility, that aesthetic enjoyment must be disinterested, that "one possessed by longing or appetite is incapable of judging beauty"? Yes, but Kant recognized that in addition to "ideal beauty" (disinterested) there is "adherent beauty" (biologically relevant and personally interested). He pretended to have a philosophical proof that ideal, disinterested beauty exists. But it is hard to tell Kant's "proofs" from idealistic assertions about human psychology. If we can find an evolutionary function for an aesthetic taste, then it is "interested," and if we can find functions for all tastes, then ideal beauty was a figment of Kant's celibate imagination. If you want a philosopher who understood the biological functions of beauty, read Nietzsche instead.

But Is It Art?

This fitness display theory of aesthetics works much better for folk aesthetics than for elite aesthetics. Folk aesthetics concerns what ordinary people find beautiful; elite aesthetics concerns the objects of art that highly educated, rich elites learn are considered worthy of comment by their peers. With folk aesthetics, the focus is on the art-object as a display of the creator's craft. With elite aesthetics, the focus is on the viewer's response as a social display. In response to a landscape painting, folks might say "Well, it's a pretty good picture of a cow, but it's a little smudgy," while elites might say, "How lovely to see Constable's ardent brushwork challenging the anodyne banality of the pastoral genre." The first response seems a natural expression of typical human aesthetic tastes concerning other people's artistic displays, and the second seems more of a verbal display in its own right.

Elite aesthetics follow the same signaling principles as sexual selection, but follow them in cultural direction specifically designed to contrast against folk aesthetics. Elites, free to enjoy all manner of costly and wasteful display, often try to distinguish themselves from the common run of humanity by replacing natural human tastes with artfully contrived preferences. Where ordinary folks prefer bright cheerful colors, elites may prefer monochromes, subtle pastels, and elusive off-whites. Where folks prefer good technique and manifest skill, elites may prefer expressiveness, randomness, psychoticism, or a childlike rejection of skill. Where folks prefer realism, elites prefer abstraction. With these preferences, elites can display their intelligence, learning ability, and sensitivity to emerging cultural norms. But to an evolutionary psychologist, the beauty that ordinary people find in ordinary ornamental and representational art says far more about art's origins.

The fitness indicator theory can explain some embarrassing questions that ordinary people ask when they are admitted to modern art museums. A common reaction to abstract expressionist painting is to dismiss it by saying "My child could have done that," "Any idiot could have done that," or "Even a monkey could

have done that." Instead of condescending at such comments, we should ask what sort of aesthetic instincts they reveal. To say "My child could have done that" could mean "I cannot discern here any signs of learned skill that would distinguish an adult expert from an immature novice." The "Any idiot" comment could mean "I cannot judge the artist's general intelligence level from this work." The "Even a monkey" comment could mean "The work does not even include any evidence of cognitive or behavioral abilities unique to our species of primate."

Interpreted from a signaling theory viewpoint, such comments are not stupid. Most people want to be able to interpret works of art as indicators of the artist's skill and creativity. Certain styles of art make this difficult to do. People feel frustrated. They have efficient psychological adaptations for making attributions about the artist's fitness given their work, but some genres of modern art prevent those adaptations from working naturally. Having paid the museum's admission fee to see good art, they are instead confronted with works that seem specifically designed to undermine judgments about quality. Art historian Arthur Danto has observed that "We have entered a period of art so absolute in its freedom that art seems but a name for an infinite play with its own concept." This extreme artistic freedom makes it difficult for people to judge an artist's talent. This is not to say that all art should be easy, or that elite art is invalid, or that we should feel comfortable acting like Philistines. The human tendency to regard works of art as fitness indicators is being used here as a clue to art's evolutionary origin—not as a prescription for how art should be made or viewed.

When we talk about the evolution of art, perhaps we are really talking about the evolution of a human tendency to make material objects into advertisements of our fitness. When we talk about aesthetics, perhaps we are really talking about human preferences that evolved to favor features of human-made objects that reliably indicate the artisan's fitness. This view suggests that aesthetics overlaps with social psychology. We possess a natural ability to see through the work of art to the artist's skill and intention. Seeing a

beautiful work of art naturally leads us to respect the artist. We may not fall in love with the artist immediately. But if we meet them, we may well want to find out whether their actual phenotypes live up to their extended phenotypes.

The Work of Art Before the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction

The Arts and Crafts movement of Victorian England raised a profound issue that still confronts aesthetics: the place of human skill in our age of mass production and mass media. During human evolution we had no machines capable of mechanically reproducing images, ornaments, or objects of art. Now we have machines that can do so exactly and cheaply We are surrounded by mass-produced objects that display a perfection of form, surface, color, and detail that would astonish premodern artists.

Mechanical reproduction has undermined some of our traditional folk aesthetic tastes. Veblen observed that when spoons were made by hand, those with the most symmetrical form, the smoothest finish, and most intricate ornamentation were considered the most beautiful. But once spoons could be manufactured with perfect symmetry, finish, and detail, these features no longer indicated skilled artisanship: they now indicated cheap mass production. Aesthetical standards shifted. Now we favor conspicuously handmade spoons, with charming asymmetries, irregular finishes, and crude ornamentation, which would have shamed an 18th-century silversmith's apprentice. A modern artisan's ability to make any sort of spoon from raw metal is considered wondrous. Such low standards are not typical of premodern cultures. Drawing on his wide experience of tribal peoples in Oceania, Franz Boas observed in his book
Primitive Art
that "The appreciation of the esthetic value of technical perfection is not confined to civilized man. It is manifested in the forms of manufactured objects of all primitive peoples that are not contaminated by the pernicious effects of our civilization and its machine-made wares."

Likewise, the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin pointed out

that, before photography, accurate visual representations required enormous skill to draw or paint, so were considered beautiful indicators of painterly genius. But after the advent of photography, painters could no longer hope to compete in the business of visual realism. In response, painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself, like the hammer-marks on a handmade spoon.

A similar crisis about the aesthetics of color was provoked by the development of cheap, bright aniline dyes, beginning